>Radford Neal wrote: >> There is a huge literature on determining the number of components >> AFTER seeing the data. In my opinion, it is mostly misdirected. >> I'd recommend that you consider carefully whether your real >> objective is connected to determining the number of components in a >> Gaussian mixture. I doubt that it is.
Aleks Jakulin <jakulin@@ieee.org> wrote: > >There is a very actual need to identify specific clusters/components. >Human mind functions on the basis of identified concepts and groups. >For example, there are many symptoms in medicine. The >clusters/components are diseases... Yes, but are the distributions of symptoms given the diseases adequately described by Gaussian distributions? If not, then the number of Gaussian components needed to described the overall distribution of symptoms will not equal the number of diseases. Radford Neal . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
